No Holds Barred: Obama’s doublespeak Russia, Israel

How worrisome to ponder what the US president's policies on Israel will be once he has greater "flexibility."

Obama, Medvedev missile defense talk 370.
(photo credit:REUTERS)

US President Barack Obama’s recent open mic comments to President Sergei
Medvedev of Russia are troubling, which explains why Obama and the White House
have decided to make light of them. Obama told Medvedev that he and Putin have
to give him “space” on missile defense until his reelection when he’ll have far
greater “flexibility,” presumably because he no longer has to answer to the
American people.

A great debate has been waged this year as to whether
President Obama is reliably pro- Israel and deserves the support of the
pro-Israel community. The president made his case to AIPAC by listing a long
record of promoting military and intelligence cooperation with the Jewish state,
arguing that “I have Israel’s back.”

For the first three years of his
presidency, Obama largely declared Israel’s settlements to be illegitimate and
put near-unilateral pressure on Israel to make peace without any expectations
from the Palestinian side.

Ever since his self-confessed “shellacking”
during the mid-term elections, part of which was due to his perceived
unfriendliness to the Jewish state, the president decided to make nice with
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and treat him with the same respect he accords
other world leaders, albeit without the warmth of the two-armed embrace he
reserved for Hugo Chavez or the bow he accorded the King of Saudi
Arabia.

At the UN in September, 2011, the president strongly supported
Israel against a Palestinian attempt at unilateral statehood. He deserves credit
for the effort. Then, he talked tough to Iran and imposed even greater
sanctions. The president has gotten much better in his posture vis-à-vis
Israel.

But the all-important question here is: Why? Based on his
actions, rather than his rhetoric, I believe the answer to the president’s new
posture toward Israel lies in his words to President Medvedev. He has no
“flexibility” before an election in which Jewish votes and financial support are
critical to what will be a very close race. And he therefore cannot be trusted
to refrain from exerting undue pressure on Israel after the election to push
through a peace deal that will likely not lead to peace but will simply
compromise Israel’s security.

Herein lies my mystification at the bizarre
story of 15 presidents of Orthodox synagogues in Passaic encouraging their
congregants to switch registration to Democrat in order to vote for Steve
Rothman over Bill Pascrell in the upcoming Democratic primary in New Jersey’s
ninth district. This is because Pascrell is perceived to be less friendly to
Israel, since he was one of 54 Congressman who signed the J Street letter
criticizing Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Leaving aside the questionable
ethics of the advice, are they seriously suggesting that any Democratic
supporter of President Obama is going to be as sound on Israel as, say,
Republican Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor who both
invited Prime Minister Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress?

PRESIDENT OBAMA has elevated committed Jews like Dan Shapiro to be our
Ambassador to Israel, and Orthodox Jews like Jack Lew to be his Chief of Staff.
But being a great friend of the Jewish people does not automatically make you a
great friend of Israel. After all, President Obama has yet to even visit Israel
as president. The principal problem is his belief that Israeli
intransigence, rather than, say, Islamist terror or Palestinian rejection of
Israel as a Jewish state, is the principal obstacle to peace in the Middle East.
In this sense President Obama follows in the footsteps of Jimmy Carter and Bill
Clinton.

It was for this reason that I was also perplexed at Dr. Ben
Chouake’s comments in The Jewish Week when he said that he and his organization
would be supporting Rothman. Rothman is the same Congressman who declared
in May, 2010, while Obama’s policies toward Israel were still abysmal, that
Obama was “the best president on US-Israel military and intelligence cooperation
in American history.”

Doesn’t the pro-Israel community have a right to
expect that a Congressman who claims to be staunchly pro-Israel will break with
the president when he mistreats Israel, even if they are the same party? Witness
the difference between Congressman Rothman and Senator Charles Schumer, both
Democrats. When the Obama administration publicly upbraided Israel over
its policies of building in Jerusalem, Senator Schumer, as reported in Politico,
went public in April, 2010, calling the Obama’s stance
“counter-productive.”

He threatened to “blast” the administration if the
State Department did not back down from its “terrible” rebuke of Netanyahu.
“This has to stop,” he said of the administration’s policy of publicly
condemning Israel’s construction of housing in Jerusalem. “I told the President,
I told Rahm Emanuel and others in the administration that I thought the policy
they took to try to bring about negotiations is counter-productive, because when
you give the Palestinians hope that the United States will do its negotiating
for them, they are not going to sit down and talk... Palestinians don’t really
believe in a State of Israel. They, unlike a majority of Israelis, who have come
to the conclusion that they can live with a two-state solution to be determined
by the parties, the majority of Palestinians are still very reluctant, and they
need to be pushed to get there... If the US says certain things and takes
certain stands the Palestinians say, ‘Why should we negotiate?’” Schumer
said.

But Rothman’s reaction to the president’s pressure was silence. One
would think that, given the considerable leverage that NORPAC has right now with
Rothman, in choosing to support him over Bill Pascrell, his democratic
challenger, Chouake would at least extract a guarantee that if Obama goes back
to his old ways of putting undue pressure on Israel, Rothman will break with the
president. But to simply give Rothman a blank check and unconditional
endorsement as being so strongly pro-Israel is to invite a repeat of Rothman’s
inaction.

Say what you want about Jimmy Carter, at least his disdain for
Israel and its leadership was out in the open and consistent. Here is a man who
outrageously compared Israel in his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid to
apartheid South Africa. Likewise Clinton, who, as president, treated Netanyahu
mostly with contempt, attacked him yet again in September of last year as an
obstacle to peace.

But Obama’s doublespeak when microphones are off and
on is troubling. If the president dislikes Netanyahu, let him not play games
with the American Jewish community and feign friendship for votes. After all,
Obama came to the White House as the anti-politician, a man who was going to
change the ways of Washington. A leader who was going to say what he means and
mean what he says.

How disappointing to discover he is guilty of the same
beltway double-speak he once condemned. How worrisome to ponder what his
policies on Israel will be once he has greater “flexibility.”

The writer,
the international bestselling author of 27 books including his the acclaimed new
bestseller Kosher Jesus, is a candidate for the United States House of
Representatives in New Jersey’s Ninth Congressional District.

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